Will AI Replace Doctors by 2030? with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz

We're all living, I know, in challenging times, but you're actually living in the best time to be alive. The opportunities that are going to happen in the next 12 to 13 years for people who take care of themselves are beyond their wildest imagination because we're at the base of that explosive geometric curve right now and it's pretty darn exciting.

Welcome to the Mark and Ben podcast and today we have a super special guest, the world famous Tony Robbins, who is in, in my view, having read a lot of his stuff and taken his seminar, probably, you know, one of the great psychologists of the last 50 years and has done just incredible work and helped so many people. And he is kind of the person, the person that you call if you need to, you know, kind of improve your performance or, or get your head together, whether you're a president or great athlete or anything. So it's a tremendous privilege to have him here. And with us also is the head of our biofund, Dr. Vijay Pandey, who will be very helpful as Tony's last book is a book called Life Force, which is a book all about regenerative medicine and how to basically live your best, healthiest life with the best health span possible. So with that, welcome, Tony.

Well, thank you, thank you for such a nice introduction. As I said before we got on, you guys are the legends here. I'm so grateful to have an opportunity to visit with you. What you've created around the world, the kinds of companies you guys have helped make happen and support is super inspiring. So thanks for having me on.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I wanted to start just a little with, you know, you have this great story that kind of led to your book or, and led to your kind of work in the field of health where you had a snowboarding accident, which is a lot, you know, kind of following you over the years. A lot of where, you know, kind of some of your best work comes from is your worst moment. So maybe you, you could talk a little bit about that and how that, how that happened here.

Well, sure. Well, I've always been involved in health. You know, I'm kind of a biohacker myself. I have to be. I was followed for three and a half years by a group that worked at Tom Brady and a lot of the greatest sports teams and they were tracking my body and you know, I do these events that are four to seven days and I've got 15,000 people in a stadium and I got to hold the person at the top for 12 hours, not a two hour movie that somebody spent $300 million to make. So it's just me. So the amount of energy running around the building, going up, engaging people is amazing. I burn 11,300 calories on average, believe it or not, every single time on a single day, I jump a thousand times. I we 290 pounds. Every time you come down, your body hits four times the body weight. So imagine a million jumps, you know, a million pounds of pressure, I should say a thousand times. A thousand happens in a day. So as a result of all that, I'm always looking for breakthroughs, but I'm also a little crazy. And I was following one day a 20 year old snowboarder down the hill and I did not have their moves and I discovered that the hard way. And I woke up having taken a jump and I thought I broke my neck. I tore my rotator cuff severely. And the nerve pain from that, if you've ever experienced, it's pretty brutal. So, you know, I own pieces of several sports teams, fortunately, and we have some of the best doctors in the world, both the Dodgers and the Warriors. And so it's like, okay, what should I do, doc? And every single one of them, surgery, surgery. And they're like, okay, what's the prognosis? Well, between three and six months of rehab and it can happen again. And I said, what about stem cells? Because, you know, I've been reading about stem cells and hearing about them like everyone else and they said, oh no, no, worthless. You know, it's not going to do anything for you. But for me it was like, you know, just like investing. You know, I want to see where the least amount of risk is the greatest possible reward. Where's the asymmetrical risk reward here? And I started asking around. I asked a dear friend of mine, Pierre Diamandis, who I think you guys may know. Yeah, yeah, Peter's dear friend and partner. And I said, who's the best in the world in this area? You've got to know him. And he said, I do. His name's Bob Harari. I'll introduce you. And it's kind of like saying, I want to learn about basketball, so I'll introduce you to my friend, LeBron James. You know, Bob's like, you know, one of the founders of what stem cells have done for people. Long story short, he said, they're right. If you use your own stem cells, you're over the age of 40. I'm not going to see much. But if you go down to Panama or various other places, he told Me, I could go and you get four day old stem cells that come from the core that's normally thrown away. He said, I think you'll see a transformation. And he said, look, you look at risk, reward, it doesn't work. And you always go to the surgery. So, long story shortened. I went down four days, several injections. First day was just really tired. Second day I woke up and I had spinal stenosis as well, for example. 14 years, no pain in my spine for the first time in 14 years. Shoulder feeling perfect, you know, three months later, the MRI. There's absolutely nothing wrong. I've never done anything since. So I got invited by the Pope. Believe it or not, the Pope does the biggest, you know, conference every two years on understanding these new cellular medicines because it's no longer fetal tissue. Obviously no one's doing that. And so I was invited to be a cleanup speaker for four days. They're the best experts in the world. And they said, I'm coming. I've come for all four days. And I met people that was sent home to die and who are totally healthy today and got to hear all of these breakthroughs. And I said, how come the world doesn't know about it? And then I found out the studies that show the amount of time it takes for a breakthrough to happen to get your clinician, on average is 27 years. It's just crazy. And I said, Dr. Vijay, nodding his head, he knows obviously, probably why he works with you instead of the traditional approach. I said, I want to get that out, but I want it not to be my opinions, like my financial books, I interview the best in the world and find out what they're saying. Not the average person, because the average doctor, even great ones, were saying, this is a waste of my time. And they were dead wrong. So this book is filled, it's 700 pages of the very best to increase your energy, your strength and your longevity from the best experts in the world.

Wow. And kind of you kind of slipped in. You went to Panama to get that treatment and so kind of what, what, what are the factors in our system that kind of make that only available in Panama? And you have to do this medical tourism in order to get. I mean, it's kind of weird. Well, I have to leave America and go to Panama to get healthy. That seems.

Maybe you should ask your Dr. Vijay more about that. He and I would probably agree. The fda, you know, they have a tough job, right? Really tough job. And these are, you know, new breakthroughs for them. And it takes a long Time for them to approve something. But, you know, There are several IDNs. I have a company here in the US that people go to called Fountain Life, where they do all their diagnostics and, you know, saves a lot of lives because you discover within a few minutes, you know, something someone didn't know was going on in their body, they had no sense of. And. But while they're there, we also have gotten some IDNs to do some of those studies with stem cells here in the country. So you can get those exceptions, but you got to know where they are, and you got to be part of a study to do it.

Yeah.

And Vijay, kind of what led to that, particularly with stem cell research?

Yeah, I mean, stem cell research is a part of the larger regenerative medicine, where people are first just trying to understand biology, because it's kind of amazing to think about even, like, how a human being gets created. It stems from these original cells that become all different types of cells. And you combine that with the fact that when we think about disease, we think of disease as something bad happening to us. But a lot of that stuff is exacerbated with age. And that age itself is like, so much of the challenge that we get cancer and Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes with such greater incidence as you get older. So aging itself is so much of the problem. And I think you combine these two things together, you get cells that are young that don't have these sort of the garbage that sort of adds up as time goes on. Really amazing things are possible. Things that sound like miraculous or like science fiction, but just even going from, like, sperm and egg to a baby is kind of miraculous. If you think about it. Miracles happen all the time. And now the question is, how can we harness the miraculous biology that's already happening?

And, you know, athletes are usually the first people to do this because they're like biohackers. Right. So my clients, like Cristiano Ronaldo, he turned things around in six weeks. That would have taken six months. And he did it with stem cells or, you know, Jack Nicholas, I don't know. A few years ago, Jack was telling me he could literally, I think it was four or five years ago, couldn't play golf, couldn't play tennis almost. The rest, you know, there's just. That's how he has to adjust his life. And he, you know, he did stem cells, and he's perfect, both of them. Plays tennis, plays golf, has a great time. So people just need to know that this is really possible. And. And, you know, the fda, to their credit, they're working hard in evaluating things and moving. I mean, stem cells have been involved in so many Studies now, as Dr. Vijay knows, there's zero question in terms of their value. But it's been the wild west in the US People get out and promote things and say things that are totally insane. And there are like one or two cases, and that's all it takes. And the media goes crazy, as they probably should, to try to warn people. Then it all gets thrown out with a baby with the bathwater. I mean, there was somebody that was doing injections of stem cells and other things in people's eyes, and somebody went blind. I mean, it's insane. That's not something you do in a trillion years. So you have to find the right sources. And that's one of the reasons that we co founded, you know, fountain life with Dr. Bob Herrera, because one of the greatest experts in the field who really found some of the initial breakthroughs that really made us understand what stem cells are and how they work. But it's still really unique. And I still, you know, some of the best places to go if someone's listening really is like a group like rmi, it's called down in Costa Rica, some of the most sophisticated and the best. But I went to Panama originally, and that's literally all it took. I mean, it's, It's. I have a dear, dear friend, we own piece of sports team together. Won't mention his name because I want to tease him about it too much, but he'll probably hear this. And I was saying, you got to go do stem cells. And he's like, same doctors going to him, rotator cuff issue. He's a little bit older than I am. And they said, no, no, no, it's not going to work. I said, they told me the same thing. Look what's happened to me. And then, you know, but he's surrounded by them, right? You know, so he went into the surgery and he's had two surgeries since then. He started over again, did another rehab that lasted four and a half months, four days for me. I mean, it's like, that's why I say Dr. Vijay. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? Sounds impossible, but it happens all the time. I mean, Dr. David Sinclair, as you're familiar with, probably Dr. Vijay, is probably one of the greatest experts in this area. And as he said, aging is the real disease. As you age, everything else accelerates, everything starts to break down. And part of that is stem cell exhaustion and the communication that those stem cells provide. That's why exosomes are now a really valuable tool as well when used properly.

Well, and you actually point to, like, one of the key things that we think about innovation being innovation in science or maybe the drug, but innovation, the regulatory side could be perhaps the most impactful way that we could help patients.

And what do you think the innovations on the regulatory side are, Vijay? Like, you know, in terms of, you know, the current process and where it could go.

Yeah, I think the challenge is like, to put your feet in their shoes. It's actually a really hard thing to do because you're the last line of things. But part of it might be sort of reframing how you think about things. And we saw this sort of in the arc of how regulation came to be, that we had this little crisis, which was this horrific thing that kids were being born malformed. And so the FDA gets created. Ironically, nothing that the FDA has done would have helped the floodmide crisis because you don't test on pregnant women and so on. But there's a lot of other things that perhaps did really help patients. But then perhaps the pendulum swung too far. And then you get to the HIV crisis where people are dying of AIDS and they're just trying to get drugs, and their options are die now or die later or try the drug and maybe survive. And actually the pendulum went the other way to realize that there was an opportunity for really helping patients by getting them the drugs. And I think that's part of it is the realization that some of these are questions of science, but some of these are questions of policy. Like what? How do we want to think about things? And that's a different type of problem. That's a policy problem, not a science problem.

Yeah. And actually, one of the things Tony talks about in the book is the processes. Safety first and then efficacy and then efficacy at scale. And how do you think about that, Vijay? Like, is that necessary for the FDA to show efficacy or is there a more efficient way?

Yeah, so you bring up a great point here because. Yeah, so testing for toxicity, that's clearly important and. And that's established. But actually, the thing that a lot of people forget is that after the fda, insurance companies will also determine whether the drug is really worth it. That's their business. And there's a real marketplace for that. And if it's. If it's improved, then they'll pay for it. And so since that's happening anyways, it's interesting to think about really harnessing that, especially since there's things that some people might think are crazy. Like if you had a drug that was as good as the best drug, but cheaper, that still can't get, that won't go by the fda because they actually has to be better than the last drug, even if it's not better scientifically, but it's better in other ways. And so, you know, if you leave that to the payers, the payers are like, hell, yeah, I would love to have a drug that's 10 times cheaper. That would be something where we could get it to more patients. We could do so much more with it. Those are things that really you only think about when you think about from a market perspective, not. And. And from the fact that they're really the customers using this. And I think that change of framing could actually have a huge impact on. On how patients get drugs.

There's also companies like Insilico that, you know, are using AI and trying to reinvent basically how drugs come to the market. And the tempo where what took 5,000 people, they can do with 50. And, you know, kind of like in Vito, what it's done in its ability to forecast, you know, how they build a chip, doing that and actually being able to predict what would happen in a study and so forth. And they're very excited about what they think they can do in this area. And they're not the only one. They're just one of the leaders in the field right now. So the ability to get the right drugs to the right people. Precision medicine, also rejuvenation, yes, but it's precision. What does your body need? What's the right amounts? And, you know, with some of the information that we have from the human genome now some of that is actually starting to become usable for us. It's been such a mass amount of information. Now the specificity is starting to come about. And then you got things like CRISPR that can enter in to actually start editing it all. So we're. We're. You're living. We're all living, I know, in challenging times, but you're actually living in the best time to be alive. We actually have the least amount of violence in the world, if you measure it, that's ever been. No one will know that if you watch your television because, you know, listen, the media is good people. Their job, though, is to make money for their shareholders. And we all are wired with a negative bias. So they know that leads, it leads. And so now anything in the world looks horrible, we get to hear about it. And we're also just Also in a season that happens every 20 years of the season changes and people are much more fearful. But in spite of all that, the opportunities that are going to happen in the next 12 to 13 years for people who take care of themselves are beyond their wildest imagination because we're at the base of that explosive geometric curve right now and it's pretty darn exciting.

Yeah. Mark, actually you just wrote the Techno Optimist manifesto where you talk about the possibility for a brighter future and kind of against the super pessimistic attitude. How do you think about the future and what the next 10, 15 years will be like?

Well, look, I mean, look, I agree with Tony. I mean, if you look at the substance of what's happening, there's a lot to be optimistic about. I mean, look, I will say though, there are a lot of forces at play in the world that want to keep these things from happening and there's a lot of repression that's taking place. Place. There's a lot of, you know, people trying to prevent change. And so, you know, there is a pretty active campaign in the other direction. And you know, that, that campaign has taken hold of a lot of universities, a lot of government agencies, you know, a lot of the, A lot of the power structure, the people who get to decide whether things are legal, the press, you know, Tony, Tony mentioned. And so, yeah, I mean, like, you know, the future is what we make it, right? It's not inevitable. Like it has to be. It has to be willed into being and people have to decide what they want.

Actually, that gets to an interesting kind of change that's happened in science over the last, you know, kind of the way science works over the last 50 years has really changed in the universities and we have the replication crisis and in various things. And one of the things, you know, kind of as a student of Tony that I've noticed is, you know, he's sort of a scientist from the previous era, from the kind of Einstein, Heisenberg, you know, that era where it's a lot of I'm going to do this experiment on myself and then I'm going to try it in reality and kind of a very pragmatic way of going about things as opposed to the goal being publishing a paper or winning a prize or getting tenure and so forth. So, Mark, maybe you could talk about how science has changed in the current crisis we have in science.

Yeah, look, I mean, there's. This is a very, very deep topic we could spend a lot, a lot of time on. I mean, look, you Know, it's like science emerged, you know, 500 years ago out of, out of actually originally out of religion, studying the universe to glory God. And then over time, it became sort of intertwined with the enlightenment and rationalism and the scientific methods started to get developed. But really, if you trace scientific innovation, discoveries from around 500 years ago to basically around World War II, it was a very elite activity. It was a lot of people experimenting on themselves. You know, it's like the archetypal scientist in the 1700s was Ben Franklin, where it was like Ben Franklin himself out in the rainstorm with a kite, right, trying to figure out lightning. And you know, Thomas Jefferson considered himself a scientist kind of in his spare time and so forth. And you know, Einstein was famously a patent clerk, right? You know, he wasn't a professor anywhere at the time. He figured out relativity. And then basically after World War II, science became institutionalized and you know, good news, bad news. We built up these massive research universities, this federal funding for science. And you know, certainly we got some, you know, big waves of science technology out of that. We got, you know, we got nuclear power, we got, you know, the computer chip, you know, we got the Internet and so forth. So, you know, we got certain aspects of biotech out of that. But you know, over the last 30 years, I mean, I think you just kind of see in plain sight with the replication crisis that institutional science, you know, seems broken at some fundamental level. Like a very large percentage of the studies in the last 50 years don't replicate. They're basically fake results. And so now we have this sort of institutional process. We saw it play out during COVID in a not very successful way. We're seeing kind of universities kind of torturing themselves in plain sight kind of these days. And so there is this sense of like in a lot of fields, a much higher level of stagnation, a much lower level of breakthrough than I think that we would expect, given all the money that's being poured into the system. And I think more people are starting to ask the question, is this actually the system that's going to generate scientific results in the future?

I can tell you in my own world, it is true. I start with me and then a small number of people around me and then I start to scale it once I see it works. You're absolutely right about that. I recently, about three years ago, in the middle of COVID some doctors from Stanford approached me because they had two of their doctors go to one of my six day programs I do called Date with Destiny. And they were both clinically depressed and came back with no depression symptoms. And friends and doctors around them were like, this is impossible. This couldn't possibly be. And they got off all their drugs. So anyway, they called me and said, you know, what data do you have? You know, typical situation. And I said, well, I said, I've got millions of testimonials. I got hundreds of thousands of people been through these various forms of programs. I can give you. No, no, like, like the data. I said, well, I'm not a scientist, and most people, I'm interested in working, whether interested in results. If they see results, they're happy. I have money back guarantee for what I do. Right. It's pretty simple. And they said, well, would you be willing to do a study on depression? Because during COVID as you know, depression went through the roof. It still is. Suicides went through the roof, overdoses went through the roof. And I said, I love that. That's an area that we're extremely effective in. And they said, well, I asked them, what will you measure against? You know, because I had no idea. What are the meta studies show around depression? And I couldn't believe it. 60% of the people that go in according to meta studies for treatment of depression with drugs and or therapy or both, 60% make zero improvement. 40% improve. And the meta studies show, on average, they improve 50%, which means they're half as depressed as they were. Now, some do get well, but it's a very small percentage of the people. And I'm sure you saw the SSRIs on the COVID of Newsweek last year. They don't work, and yet we still sell them for some reason. And so the bottom line is, I said, well, you can almost get that result with a placebo. He said, yeah. I said, I think we all crush that. But you do this study. I said, but what's the best study? Well, you know, that's your meta study. What's the most effective thing you've ever seen? And they said it was a study done at Johns Hopkins about four and a half years ago where they take people for a month who are clinically depressed, and they for a month gave them psilocybin, right? Some magic mushrooms and cognitive therapy for a month. I said, well, out of that, you should have got some kind of change in their psyche, you know?

Yes.

They said it was amazing. It was the greatest result they've ever measured in the history of psychiatry. 54% of the people six weeks after the treatment had no symptoms of depression whatsoever. I said, okay, well, our target is to do better than that. But you're in charge. Why don't you model that same study, use the same contrasting group, which is what they did. The results were so amazing that they sent out blind the stats to do different organizations because they're afraid they're going to get canceled. 100% of the people that they put through this program after six weeks had zero expressions of depression. Better than that, 17% of them had suicidal ideation. Not a single one at suicidal ideation. Afterwards they followed up. Eleven months later they're going to do 12. But they did 11 months because people were getting back from COVID and they had all the stats on, you know, how people loneliness and all the things that are happening at home. Anyway, 71 decrease in negative emotions. Eleven months later, 52% increase in positive emotions. Loneliness through the floor. The transformation is amazing. It was written up in scientific journals just as you described right in the Journal of Psychiatry. I thought, boy, people would really be looking for us now. Not a single phone call. No one's interested and they're still selling the drugs that don't work. So part of it is the institutionalization of the system. We're actually doing a study right now, Stanford want to do another one. They're doing the largest behavioral study they've ever done. 750 people, not one month, three months, full year. It's just finishing this month because last December it began. And it's on quiet quitting and loud quitting. And engagement, as you guys know, when it comes to business engagement equals ebitda, you know, the highest levels of engagement, highest levels ebitda. And for your audience, you know, we look at, they measure things as engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged. Activists engage with the people that still work for you but are trying to harm your company. And what's crazy is that's the sing in those four years of COVID The largest drop in engagement in the history of their records. The largest increase in actively disengaged the loud quitting people and the study they did with us, I can only tell you what it was at six months. They're going to announce it and publish it shortly at the 12 month mark. But we quadrupled the engagement took what four years got rid of in six days, they sustained it. I never saw them again. And at the six month mark, which is the last measurement I got to see had increased another 50% beyond what it had because they had a shift in their psychology and their mindset. I know you, I Think it's you, Ben? Maybe it was you, Mark. I can't remember, but I get you guys mixed up in your quotes sometimes because I've read so many. But I think one time I read you said the hardest part of being a CEO is really my own mindset. You know, it's your ability to get yourself to go through. That's what I found. I got 111 companies to push through the difficult times. Anybody can do well when things are going your way or find the right players. That's not hard. I think you also talked about dealing with those players that they feel entitled as well. But the psychology changes everything, and it's true for everyone. So that's my obsession. And we really want to make a difference because we're living in a world where most CEOs don't know what the hell to do. I was at a Fortune 400 conference and with Mark Benios, good friend of mine, and they invited me in and they were doing these interviews and they were asking people there, how many of you have people working, you know, five days a week? And, and at the time, less than. This is six months ago, less than 20% of the people raised their hand. And these are fortune, you know, 400 companies, and it's just 500 companies. I just, I can't even believe it. How many wish Everybody was here five days a week. 95 of them raise their hand. Right. So I know there are jobs where you can be hybrid, you know, or be gone all the time, certainly software, things of that nature. But we're dealing with issues that we've never dealt before in the history of business. And obviously it's affecting office buildings and, and local restaurants and everything else. But helping people become more engaged to me is the only way they're going to be fulfilled. Because I'm sure you've read people are the most unhappy in their work that they've measured in 20 years, even pretty, you know, Covid. And they thought, well, they don't want to go back to work because, you know, I shouldn't have to do that. I'm like being home now. And now when they're home, they feel isolated, you know.

Right, right.

Think is if I have it easier, I'm going to be happier. And you both know, all three of you know you wouldn't be who you are. You know that the effort is the reward, that being able to push those things is what shapes you. It's what makes you proud of who you are as a human. This idea of self esteem that's so overused with children, it takes me crazy. You don't get self esteem because someone tells you you're good and you don't lose it because people tell you you're worthless. Someone tell you worthless your whole life and go read between the lines, I'm going to show you who I am. Or someone tell you you're beautiful your whole life and you don't believe it. Right. What makes you have esteem for yourself is doing difficult things. And our society unfortunately is not reminding people that we're here to give something. We're not just here to get. And most of our society is measuring what to get. And that's making people so unhappy they don't understand that there's. You'll never be happy when you don't have a meaning in your life more than yourself and when a focus is just on your own sense of comfort. Anybody can meet comfort needs pretty easily.

Yeah, well, that gets into. Well, I have a couple so many questions. One, the first is, you know, it's funny you said you're not a scientist, but I think by Mark's definition of original scientists, you're absolutely a scientist. And it seems like really unfortunate in the current system that here you are with these amazing results which should be what we're teaching undergraduate psychology students and so forth. It should be what the average person when they go to see a psychiatrist gets. And Instead we're getting SRI's that don't work. And do you ever think about. And you have your own lane and you get it to the people through your seminars and so forth. But you know, do you ever think about like, is there a way to emerge those channels or, or to kind of, you know, overcome this just like weirdness where we have one method that you've invented that gets amazing results. We have this whole other school of thought based on psychologists that were wrong about a lot, you know, like the, in the history of psychology, you know, some of the heroes were just wrong. Like Freud was wrong about a tremendous amount of things, I guess. How do you, how do you think about that? Because, you know, you have such a big mission to kind of improve people's lives.

I want to reach as many people as I can. So truthfully, these journals and people of that nature don't reach a lot of people. My seminars, thanks to Covid, you know, when everything got shut down, I was used to doing stadiums. So if you can imagine, I get a call from the governor of California who I don't share necessarily values with 100, but I'm friendly with. And he says, sorry to let you know, the stadium that you had there for 15,000 people, you can only put 100 people in there. And I'm like, what? So I was like, screw this, we'll go to Vegas. They'll never shut down Vegas. We moved all the people to Vegas five days before they shut down Vegas. We're going to Texas. I know the governor there, he's never going to bend. Same thing. About a week out, he ends up, I'll do movie theaters. We'll do a movie theaters, only 10 people each. That's what they'll allow you to do. They'll just be, you know, 1200 movie theaters. They'll go locally, they'll have a big screen. Great. So I finally just. They cut that out. So I finally built a studio and now we do our live events with 15, 000 people, but we do hybrid events also. And I started doing events then where all of a sudden my 15, 000 person event was done in people's homes. I built 20 foot high LED screens, about a 25,000 square foot place, built it all around me, brought in, made some new software technology so people could shake their phone instead of clapping. You know, it's got electric signal of one clap so you don't hear up. When 20,000 people clap, it's like thunder. You know, I went, you know, to our friends over there at Zoom and got them to expand the volume from a thousand people to 25,000. And all of a sudden we started growing. So now the last large seminar I did last year was 1.8 million people for six days. So it's like just go around it. The other way is, I think by hitting businesses. And I've always said I want to talk to whoever, the general public, I'll build it, they'll come. But I'm going to start directing businesses now because now that I have this way to do things asynchronous and synchronal, but anywhere in the world, I think it's a new way to do this. And that's why I supported this study, because I think we can start to affect people's psychology, emotion and health by hitting the bottom line. And that'll bring those resources to people and companies. So I think that's another avenue that we're going to not think we're now we're going for to have an impact.

We think about what Tony does. Actually, maybe you're not a scientist, you might be way more impactful than that. Maybe you're like a psychological Engineer, you know, because you're. You're like, you're. You're really wanting to solve a problem, not just, like, study something, write it up, and then move on, you know, and like an engineer will iterate, will study, will be empirical, will learn from theory and learn from all the other stuff. But we really actually care about working. And whether it works or not is, I think, the only thing you really care about, right? You don't care about awards or.

What I care about is finding people that. I'm not the only one. I mean, that's like they're. I'm not saying I got all the answers. The way I wrote my financial books, the writer wrote this book. This book, you know, 150 of the best regenerative scientists in the world, Nobel laureates, the best doctors in the world. That's who I go to to get the answers. And then now I know them. Oh, you're so smart. I'm not smart. They're smart. I'm just smart enough to go to them. Same thing in the financial area, you know, Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, you know, Paul Tudor Jones. These all guys that became my friends over the years because I went and took what they did and made it simple enough that the general population could use it. My billionaire clients, not invaluable, but so did, you know, the average person getting started. So to me, it's a modeling process and an iteration process, modeling what already works and then figure out how to go to a different level. But I don't have to reinvent the wheel, but I have been doing what I've been doing. Now this will be my 47th year coming up. You can clearly see I started at three, of course. But, you know, if at this point I could be an idiot, I'd have to see there are patterns, right? That's what makes all of us good at what we do. It's pattern recognition, pattern utilization. And then if you're good enough, pattern creation, maybe you play someone else's music. Initially, you learn the patterns, you learn how to use them. But eventually you can build on top of the shoulders of the people that you've learned from. And I think that's what we all want to be, but also that's what we want our children to be from us, right? To have a choice, to have choices we never had before. And I think that's threatened a little bit by some of the psychology that's currently in the culture. But I'm not worried because history is. You know, I always think of history in cycles, right? It's like good times creates weak people. You always see it. You can see it Roman history, Greek history. Good times, weak people, weak people. Bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create great times. Think of the great generation born in 1910. And they come of age, you know, at 19 years old in 1929, it's like they thought they're gonna party like everybody else. They were generation that was looked down on, like millennials were by older generations, or Z generation is now. They were looked down on. They didn't. They got everything so easily. They didn't go through World War I. They didn't have to fight. They had radio and television, and all of a sudden, boom, Depression. It toughened them up. They had to change to survive. And then, oh, by the way, by the time they hear 29, it's 1939, it's World War II. When they go to war, that looks like. Look like we're going to lose. I was going to win. Those people came back strong. And every, every, every single, you know, generation is tested. The question are you tested in the early years, the middle years, the later years, or the late, late years of your life? Because if you study history, the patterns are consistent. So I, I study history, I study patterns. And humans have so many patterns. You're not angry all the time. You don't know very good all the time. You don't do anything all the time. There's certain patterns that make you that way, and you are not your pattern. And that's why I'm able to help people to change. They don't have to change themselves. This change the habit they've been calling themselves, that's really getting in the way.

Definitely, you know, you hit on a thing that I want to ask Mark about. So, you know, Tony kind of mentioned, you know, things in the culture that are degenerative in particular, you know, we've got this big wave of everything from the what's good for the people is for them to not work so many hours or, you know, it's better to be, you know, a victim than, you know, an aggressor and this and that and the other. And they're all kind of extremely destructive things for personal psychology. And like, how do you, you know, how do you look at kind of the waves of these political movements and, you know, what's, what's happening? You know, when has it happened historically? How do we get out of it?

Yeah, it's actually something. It's actually something that you go back to Nietzsche talked about this, like 140 years ago. Now, basically, it's claims to speak on behalf of the oppressed are how our sort of modern ruling class, like, stays in power. And so, you know, if you want to run for office, right, like, you know, what's the message that you tell people? You know, do you tell people, you know, you can take responsibility for your own lives and you can achieve great things, or do you tell people you're a victim and, you know, anything bad that's happening to you is not your fault, and it doesn't matter what you do, you'll never be able to succeed. And the system is rigged against you and the system is oppressive and, you know, people of other, you know, colors and ethnicities hate you, right, and are trying to keep you down. And I often use the term demoralization campaign, right? Like you, you. You basically to like, you know, basically win office. You basically sell a demoralization story. And then of course, you, you promise that of course, as the leader, you're going to help these poor oppressed people kind of overcome that. And then that, you know, that's, that's the part that never quite happens. Because.

Magic trick.

Yeah. Well, because if that happens, then you, you can't. Then you can't run for reelection on the, on the same story, right? You can't. You know, this is the problem. And this is also the problem with like every nonprofit, right? This is like the problem, you know, homeless, you know, so we spend like, what is it? We spend, you know, like a billion plus dollars to these, you know, quote unquote, homelessness nonprofits in San Francisco every year, and homelessness keeps getting worse, right? And it's like. Well, of course it does. Is because like, how, if you're a homelessness nonprofit, do you make money by actually solving homelessness or having there be more of it, right? You make money by having there be more of it. You feed the problem. And so that, that just, you know, we're just, we're in this cult. It's really intensified in the last decade. Like, we're in this culture in which, you know, the, the sort of prevailing message from the, from the sort of most, most important elites is, you know, you're a victim. And they're going to keep selling that story for as long as people keep buying it. And then I think, you know, over time, I think more and more people are going to figure out that, that, that they're being sold a bad story and that, that, that, that leads nowhere good and that that's. There's no way to live life, you know, is by thinking that you're oppressed the whole time. And, you know, the right thing to do is to say, oh, actually I, you know, I live in a, like, free and prosperous society and I can, I can improve myself and I can take control of my destiny and I can do great things.

Until then, you're. Until then, you're trapped. When people come to my seminars because of what you described, I say, I just want to warn you in advance, this is not a safe space. And there'll be no warnings. If you, if you're looking for a safe space and your definition is, everyone's going to tell you what you already believe and you've wasted your time to come here because this is all about questioning all of our beliefs and testing it and seeing how does it really work in the real world. And in that way, it's really the safest space. All because the truth will set you free. But most people don't care about the truth anymore. They just care about reinforcing what they already believe. And as you said, whatever's reinforced continues. But the pattern is so extreme now. It's like, you know, silence is violence. You know, words are violence. You know, I think I heard Chris Rock say, if you think words are violence, no one slapped the shit out of you on national television. Violence is violence. Right. You know, and those same people now are chanting death to very to people in Israel. I mean, it's just, that's just crazy. I'm like, I, I hate what's happening on both sides of the Middle east when innocent people are injured. I don't care what their background is, it's horrific. But to say, you know, words of violence and you're going to eliminate somebody from the staff for doing it, but you're not going to stand up and say no. Beheading of children and raping of women is totally okay. It's not okay on any side of any. Whether it be in Gaza or be Israel or anywhere else. And none of it is okay. But it's crazy where our world has entered. But again, the pendulum. I agree with you, Mark. I think the pendulum is thrown so far. And there's a point now where the quiet middle start finally starting to speak up because it's affecting the quality of their life on a massive scale. But when you vote people in office and they know they can give you whatever you want and they're willing to do it to and just print money, that's why we end up in the position we are Right now with inflation.

Yeah. You know Tony, on the, on the kind of Israel, Palestine issue, you had a crazy story in the book about a seminar you were doing on right when 911 happened where you had a, one of the members of the audience was from Pakistan and then the other was a Jewish member and it sounded like they were ready to kill each other right there, like at the seminar. And then, you know, you work through it maybe. I would love to kind of hear that story and how you think about it in today's context.

It was, it was 9 11, I was in Hawaii. We had, we're doing at the time a 10 day seminar where I basically kill people, take them 12, 14 hours a day for 12 straight days and nights and, and you know, I bring in some really brilliant, brilliant teachers. I had Storm and Norman, the channel Norman come in and teach leadership, a variety of people. But what happened during 911 was, you know, I just finished an evening at midnight, one in the morning and we were in Hawaii. So around 3 o' clock in the morning, banging on my door, letting me know, hey, turn on the television. And so I did and saw what everybody saw on cnn. And first, the first building hit and I thought this is horrible. And everybody didn't know it was terrorism. When the second one happened, all hell was breaking loose in the building because the entire hotel was made up of thousands of people from all over the world. We were translating, I think eight languages simultaneously. We had every religion there. So there were people that were fighting in the halls, there were people crying uncontrollably, knew this was the end times. Everybody responded to it. Based on what I call their emotional home. We have an emotional home, a place we go back to whether it's good or bad. If you're used to negative feelings, sadness and feeling sorry for yourself, you'll go there. If you're an angry person, you'll go there. If you're a person that looks out to support others, you're going to be in a supportive role. And that's all that happened. Everybody played the roles they play. They went to their emotional homes. But it was brutal. No one's wanting to come to classes and get everybody in class. We brought them all together and I said, listen, by now I'm sure most of you know, you know, this has occurred. We can't get off the island here. You know, the, all the flights were canceled, so we got to do what we can do. So let's do a blood drive and then let's process this together. And I asked people Three questions. Because these are the three decisions people make every moment of their life. First, you decide what to focus on. We don't experience life. We experience the life we focus on. And what's wrong is always available. So is what's right. So 3,000 people died. It was horrific. I wouldn't play that any smaller than what it was. But 4,000 people die every day of heart disease and cancer, and no one says a word. Their mothers, fathers, brothers. If they were on airplanes falling out of the sky, everybody, right, Dr. V.J. would be going crazy. But we're just immune to it. So whatever we focus on, we feel. And so the decisions of what to focus on, whether you can control it or not, whether it's the past, present, or the future, whether it's what's missing from your life or what you have, controls the quality of your life. So I said, I'll put you in groups. I want you to tell me, what did you focus on when you heard it? What did it mean to you at the end? The beginning was it, and what are you going to do? And then I walked around the room and got the education of a lifetime. Because, you know, I watched this woman got this really thick accent, and she was talking so angrily, spit was coming out of her mouth. And the people in her group. And I made sure the groups had men and women and they were from different countries. And so I. I peered in, I said, ma', am, can I ask you a question? I said, are you from United States? She said, no. Have you visited New York ever? She said, no. I said, you have family here? She said, no. I said, well, then why are you so angry? And she goes, because I just do. I just get so angry about these things. I said, well, I'm just curious. How often do you get angry? She goes, what do you mean, how often do I get angry? I get in real life? Why? I said, well, once a week, once a month, daily. And long story short, it came down to. She sees anger as fuel. She does it all the time. I went to another group just to give you a quick example. And a woman's crying uncontrollably, and she's talking about how guilty she feels because she's a nurse, she's from New Jersey, and she should be there. And she can't get off the island, and people are dying and she's not able to help. And I felt her emotion. And then, same thing. I stopped her. And I said, you know, can I ask you a question? How often do you feel guilty? So what do you mean? I said once a month feels guilty all the time. So people went to their place. But when I went to do the shares, one woman got up and shared the fact that after we finished at midnight, she went back to her room and she was planning on separating from her boyfriend and left in bad, bad situation. But what I said that night, she decided to call him, say I love him and that she was wanted to marry him. And it turns out he was at the top of the World Trade Center. And sure enough, he got him. She got a left a message from him. She was asleep and she played it for us, talking about how much he loves her and how much it means such a world to him that what she said. And he doesn't know how to tell her this, but he's not going to get out of the building, it's on fire. And she's wondering probably why this happened because her previous boyfriend was murdered. And he said, all I can tell you is God should. Maybe this is the lesson to tell you. Don't ever wait to love again. And so everybody's crying. Next guy stands up at the end of the story, he says, my name is so and so, I'm from Pakistan, I'm a Muslim. I'd love to say I could hold your hand and feel sorry for you, but this is retribution. It was like the entire building turned into a war zone because, you know, another man stood up who was, you know, had lost, I guess, 12 of his friends that day at the top of the center there. And one of the financial institutions and his family lived in the occupied territories, Jewish man. And they started going at it and I brought them on stage and we did this integration process that it's all on film, anybody can see it. We posted it because you took these two guys that wanted to kill each other at the end, they formed a group that actually went around with Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Muslims all together and started preaching in different churches and mosques and so forth. Peace. And the young man wrote a book called My Jihad where he talked about he was trained in a camp. His dad sent him to Berkeley so he wouldn't do it. He told people that morning his only wish was he wish he was on one of those planes. And then he realized the jihad was with himself. And now he's transformed himself. So there's ways to shift people no matter what. How does that relate to today? I mean, there's so much pain that you, you have to do it. Families at a time, organizations at a time. First got to Feed people, provide electricity, and save some lives. And then we're gonna have to deal with the psychology, what's happening there on both sides. This. There are no simple answers in this case, but people can completely change their beliefs, no matter how embedded they are. If you find the right leverage and if you can get them to see that, it's really everything I blame you for. Even if you've done something to me, my experience is mine alone. Everybody has their own 100% responsibility for what they feel. Now, somebody tries to kill you, obviously you're going to feel a certain way. But being able to shift your psychology so you can have a healthy life, everyone's capable of doing. It's not easy, but it's doable. And it's certainly hard with a group of people. But, I mean, I've been doing that with tens of thousands of people, millions of people, for decades, and I'm not the only one.

One of the, you know, kind of things that you get into in the book, which kind of merges your work and kind of the work of, of kind of all the scientists that you've, you've assembled and, and so forth, is this kind of idea of, you know, the, the mind's connection to your health and things like psychoneuroimmunology and, and like, how that works. And I'd love kind of for you to talk about that a little and Vijay for you to kind of chime in on, you know, like, what, you know, how powerful is this? You know, if I get sick, can I just fix myself? And how does that work would be, I think, really interesting for everyone?

Well, I look at it, you got to do both. I look, you got to do the physical side and the mind side. The mind has much more power than we give it credit for. And I know Dr. Fijay, I'm sure, have done homework on it, but you can take any result you get with virtually any drug, and at least 25% of the time, the placebo will do the same result in almost every study I've read, in some cases as much as 40 or 50%. But there's no money made in placebos. And placebos can even work when you know it's a placebo. That's what's crazy about it. The interesting thing about placebos is people think, well, it's just a sugar pill, and then you convince the mind and then somehow the body takes over. But, you know, Harvard's done studies where they actually give people, you know, a barbiturate, which is slowing the body down and tell them it's an amphetamine, give them a big red pill. The size of the pill makes a difference, by the way. The bigger the pill, the more profound the impact. If you give an injection, even more so. If you do fake surgery, even more so, more convincing to the brain and produces a result. But imagine me giving a barbiturate. Your whole body has to slow down. Your brain believes it's an amphetamine and their biochemistry speeds up and they do vice versa. I mean the most invasive would be. There was a study done by the VA and it was on arthroscopic surgeries. And what they did was they took a group and as a result of this, they changed all the policies the VA around this and they gave them fake surgeries. What they did is put them under just like the other group. Nobody who they were put a cut open the knee, just cut the flaps, sewed it back, did nothing to the knee. The other group, they did arthroscopic surgery. And what they found is after six months the group that had no nothing done to them improved more than the group the surgery. And after doing the several follow up studies that they no longer fund it. So it's literally that powerful. And it was not just self reporting, was also the mending of it as well. So what our brains can do is amazing. You know, Ellen Langer from Harvard is a friend of mine. She's the one who did those reverse studies where she took people in their late 70s to this place in the Adirondacks for three weeks. And they put nothing but newspapers, pictures, everything from 35 years earlier. And they literally lived it. And they were all talking. The first person, they had a television set that had things from that time in black and white. And in two weeks, the transformation of these people, the pictures alone would blow your mind. But their blood pressure went down, their immune systems became stronger. I mean the changes, their resting heart rate changed. I mean these are changes that just physically shouldn't be any way. But the mind has that kind of power. It also has the opposite power. I remember Norman Cousins, when he was alive, I had a privilege of spending time with him. He came to one of my firewalks because he's so fascinated by what the mind could do in that area. And he was telling me the study about, he said he was at this game, it was in LA and was written up about. He wrote up about it later and there was this person who started projectile vomiting and it was right there in the midst of a large number of people and they ran off. And when they came back, they were trying to figure out what it was, what caused this. And so sure enough, they thought maybe it was the soda pop he drank. So the announcer said, if you drink any of that soda pop, please stop. You know, I'm talking about Coca Cola, whatever it was out of that machine. And people started projectile vomiting all over the stadium, literally. They had 12ambulances come there and take people away. And then about an hour later, they figured out it wasn't the soda pop and everything cleaned up and recited. So we not only can heal ourselves, we can make ourselves sick. And you know, our concept of aging and what age means is so rooted. I used to have this gentleman who's now passed away when I was in my late early 30s. I bring him to my events and I would have people close their eyes during one of these health events. And before I began just to talk about the power of the mind, I said, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a 75 year old man. Okay, what you think a 75 year old man would look like. Get a good picture, good sense. And I have my friend walk out on stage. When they open their eyes, I said, is this the man you pictured? And he's, you know, he was bench pressing £450 and he was just chiseled and incredible at 75 years old. Right. And one of my dear friends, this is years ago, one of my dear friends I've known for almost 35, 40 years, the other day, just turned 70 and he said he was walking by the mirror and he goes, he looked in the mirror and he's fit his fiddles. Unbelievable, right? And he goes, you know, I owe that to you. He goes, that stuck in my head because the image I had was a broken down old person. But from that day on, I had an image of what I'm actually like right now today. So, yes, I would never just say only the mind. I go for the biochemistry. You go for the shift that you're going to make in the body. But if you leave out the mind, you're an idiot. They're so combined. You can do all the right things biochemically and your mind can overcome them.

Yeah, this is one of the areas I think is super fascinating. I think a lot of times people reframe things the wrong way, that we think of the null hypothesis as the placebo instead of no drug. And I think finally we're starting to understand actually how it works. Because if the placebo effect is so strong, be great to understand it be great to harness it and it'd be great to take advantage of it because of hopefully a lack of negative side effects. And I think that's what we're starting to see in that field of psychoneuroimmunology. And it is just fascinating even from the molecular point of view. Like the same proteins, GPCRs that are in our brains are in our gut and the mind gut interface is very complicated and very interesting and, and we're just starting to sort of poke away at it. And you know, I think part of what the problem here that for everything we've been talking about for trying to improve healthcare is that we've got the innovations on the science side, we've got to deliver it to people. And I think what we're starting to see is more value based care, more ways that people care about the outcome rather than just providing a service. And if you care about the outcome, you'll incorporate whatever works. And we're just at the beginning of that. But I think people will really start looking to these areas when they're really incented for solutions.

Yeah, and Vijay, maybe you could expand on that from like a healthcare system. What does that mean? Like how does the healthcare system work today and drive the incentives and then, then where do we want to get to in order to become focused?

Yeah, yeah. The healthcare system right now is a fee for service, kind of like a plumber. So a plumber will come over your house and they'll fix something. Do they care about your house? Do they, you know, will they be thinking ahead for what your house needs? That's not their job. Like that's your job. Right. And so right now we have to be sort of the general contractor of our body and we have to bring in the plumber and the electrician or whatever to take care of that. What would be better is somebody who is financially incented for our outcome for incentive to keep us healthy. And we're starting to see that right now where one of the innovative areas of companies that are both payers and providers. So right now an insurance company can largely just say no or, or pay. But if the insurance company is also one providing they want to keep you healthy because healthier people cost less. And of course now we're finally have the incentives aligned. And I think that was what was mistaken. Like our incentives are misaligned, we'll have all this crazy stuff. But when we all want the same thing, which is for us to be healthy, then actually people will do creative things to be able to align that and I think what Tony was talking about just recently, but also earlier for like different ways of thinking about mental health and all these things. If you know you're just providing services, you may even want to be a therapist as an annuity. The therapist is there for a long time. Curing someone quickly may not be what you're financially incentive for. And so we need to really flip all of that. And I know Tony, you've spoken to that. So if we can flip the incentives, I think then we can finally get the health care we want.

And then you know, Tony mentioned something earlier that I wanted to come back to, which is kind of drug development is very different now with AI and kind of. And then our understanding of the human body through kind of a different data set than we've had historically. How Vijay, maybe you could talk about that. And how does it kind of change the way that we want to think about everything from development to regulation to when things are safe and so forth.

This is something that I think many of us have been waiting for for a decade or two because we see that biology is really complicated. I mean of that there's no doubt. We don't even know all the actors, we don't know all that's going on. And so a very top down approach is probably going to fail. But what AI I think has in common with what we're talking about with Tony's approach is that AI is very empirical. It's like give me the data, let me come up with the best thing I can come up with. Let's try it and then we'll iterate that and do better and better. And in a sense it's basically just the best way to mathematical way to handle the data and iterate and improve. And that's what active learning is and so on. So that's actually perfectly coinciding with this revolution in biology and medicine where we can now measure things. We can do tons of biological experiments, we have tons of wearables, tons of measurements. And so data plus AI means, plus iterations means we can finally make advances. And I think that has to then be coupled with a sort of a regulatory system that would understand that there are these advances and try to help accelerate them. Because if we don't get those iterations, we won't, we'll be stuck. And sometimes it may take like 5, 10 tries or something and. But we want to do it safely, but we want to encourage innovation. And that tension is, is I think still being worked out right now. I think the good news is when you talk to people in regulatory agencies, I think they, they want to help people, they want innovation, they don'. Want to stifle innovation. So now the question is how can we work together to really promote that?

Well, on the incentive thing there though, if you work at the fda, for example, it would seem that if you let a drug through that's dangerous, that's very bad.

That is very bad.

But if you approve a drug that's good, that's like maybe nobody cares.

Yeah, that's the problem, that asymmetry there is for sure there. And like, I think, think we have to reframe it. Almost like the classic trolley problem where if you don't let the drug through, we're actually killing people right now by not getting these advances through. And, and I think human beings aren't very good at sort of holding that in their head.

Very bad at it. Yeah, that's why we, yeah, it's, it's why we take off our shoes after.

9, 11 or like the self driving cars, right? Like self driving cars now in many cases could be safer than human drivers, but you make if, but they won't be perfect. But people I think can't reason that actually you're killing people by having humans drive once self, once cars are self driving cars are more safe.

And I guess, Tony, in the work that you're doing on health, how do you think about kind of how to move these incentives so that, you know, all this great work can actually take effect because does feel like the amount of innovation that's about to happen is going to completely overwhelm the current way of doing things, you know, particularly with incentives to, to kind of stop progress.

I think AI is providing the ability to do things faster, quicker and more accurately. So take two of the biggest diseases that you know, kill people, heart disease and cancer. AI has made a giant change in that. Just in the last year, year and a half, I was one of the first people to get one of the clear CCTA scans. My partners at Fountain Life called me up and said, Tony, this is the greatest breakthrough in cardiology we've seen in 20 years. And what it does is, you know, you try to read one of these scans of what's happening in your body. It's, it's pretty hard to be able to read even if you're a great doctor. And these scans literally go in and create a three dimensional description of what's going on in your body and can track, okay, these are calcified versus soft. I mean the soft ones can break off, right? And literally they'll give you the widow effect. They're going to give you a heart attack or a stroke. Calcified, your body's actually healed itself and there's been no real way to clearly, you know, see that before these AIs. And the level of detail is mind boggling with precision. And I remember I went and I had my 80 year old father, father in law come with me and man I really love dearly. I mean he's a self made guy, he was in the lumber business. He strong as an ox still. Yeah, when you start turning 80 and everybody starts saying, well you should, you know, start, prepare for the inevitable end and so forth, I could see the psychology drop in him. So I said, hey pops, I said I'm gonna go do this test. You know, we're just, you know, going to the center here. It's, It's a little 30 minutes away. I said, why don't you come with me, we'll do it together. I said, I'm sure we both have some plaques, but it'll show us what it is and then it'll show us what to do. And it's exactly precise to our bodies like nothing you've ever seen. And he said, okay, we'll go. So we go, we do the test and you know, to give you a contrast, one of our friends had a calcium test of a thousand. He couldn't get life insurance. It was over. I've never seen an insurance company do this before. But with our work we went to them and they reversed themselves because when we showed his thousand was all calcified, his body was completely healthy, there was no risk whatsoever. And they actually gave him the life insurance, which blew me away. I never think insurance company would do that. But that's how accurate is now. It's indisputable. Anyway, the end of the story is my father in law, he's clean as a whistle, right? I got a few things, but he's clean as a whistle. He walks out of that place. And then, you know, we had this, we have this hydrodissection which is, you know, if you have certain problems in your body with your tissue or nerves are trapped, you know, they put this fluid in and it helps to open it up and heal it in seconds, literally. I had a problem in my ankle for 14 years. You know, 15 minutes has never been a problem again. It's mind boggling. And so, you know, you had a hip problem. So they went and did hydrodissection. He did his test. I'll never forget we get on the plane and Mark and Betty sits down from me, Dr. V.J. and he's got this big smile on his face. He goes, you know, Tony, people talk about living to be, you know, over 100 and stuff. I don't know about that. But, you know, I'm only 80, you know, my heart is solid like a 20 year old. He goes, you know, my hips, I'm walking perfect. He goes, I can live another 20 years. I'm as long as you've known my daughter, you know. He said, I think I could do that. So the psychological shift's amazing. But then, then there's cancer, right? So the AI was part of how Grail came up with their blood tests, which you're probably familiar with. Not all your audience may be, but you know, the biggest problem with cancer is we catch it too late. We have a variety of tests, a mammogram, let's say, you know, you know, colonoscopy and so forth. But the ones that get us are the ones we don't measure. And the problem is when, you know, you read the cancer society studies, you say, well, if you get stage three or stage four, you've got about a 80 to 90% chance of dying. I prefer a, you know, 20 to 10% chance of living. That's how they frame it. To be fair. On the other side, if you catch it at stage one or two, it's about a 98 to 100 chance that you're going to be healthy. So I had a friend that went in and you know, did our forecast and did all the scans, I should say, and did the Grail and did the MRI for his body and his wife was getting to do it. He didn't want to do it. Sure enough, he had, you know, stage one bladder cancer. But guess what? Caught it immediately. Yeah, 40 minute procedure, outpatient. He's totally fine and healthy. I have another partner only two weeks ago who is really, he's, he's looking to help create this solution in the highest end locations. The person who built a multi billion dollar hotel set of hotel chains, sold them December of 2019, right before COVID Brilliantly and. But now he's a different stage of life and he wants to build these centers where they're not like these little spas, but a place you have a home or go visit and live, but where it's truly the cutting edge in medical care and medical screening and rejuvenation. And so I put him through our center and he was blown away. And guess what? Two aneurysms one about to hit him. He went and just, you know, had the surgery the other day. It saved his life. So AI is already entering the world because it's so much more effective and it's so much cheaper, and it's going to only get faster and cheaper. And to me, that's the solution, besides just educating the general public. General public no longer just accepts a medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, they go on the web and read 8 million horrible things. But a lot of people today are saying, no, I'm going to educate myself. I need to be the CEO of my own health today. I need to take these doctors in who are the best and get them to coach me. But in the end, I've got to make the decision what's right for my own health. I have a tumor. I was 51 in high school. I'm now 6 7. I tell people the difference is personal growth. It's a lot of personal growth. The truth is, I had a tumor and in my pituitary gland. And it made me grow 10 inches in a year, which is. When people talk about growing pains, it's physically stretching your muscles, cramping. It's incredibly painful. But I went through that and then didn't know what it was. And then around 30 years old, I was. I'm a helicopter pilot as well. So I'd go in and get my, renew my license. And this doctor had a suspicion. He did a blood test and called me and told me I needed immediately have surgery, you know, brain surgery. I said, what do you mean, brain surgery? Well, you've got a tumor in your pituitary gland. How do you know this blood test? I said, well, you know, I didn't come to you with any side effects. And long story short, I went through. He did not have a good bedside manner. He wanted to do surgery no matter what. I wanted a second opinion. He was irritated. So I did several second opinions. So the Mayo Clinic has found that 74% of the time, the second opinion is not the same as the first. It's insane. They recommend a second opinion, right? So I went and got five opinions, and one wanted to drug me, one wanted to do surgery, one wanted me to go overseas to do these shots in Switzerland only twice a year to be safe. And I said, but, Doc, I don't have. My arteries aren't enlarged, all the things. I don't have any symptoms. He goes, well, just to be certain. Turned out that drug and man was a good man, by the way. Six months later, the FDA did not allow it in the US because they found out it caused cancer. So I still have the tumor. It infarct which means swallowed a good portion of itself up up. It's still in my brain. It gave me a huge amount of growth hormone which I don't. I get, you know what Basically bodybuilders pay 1200amonth for I guess and it's naturally flowing through my veins and you know, I look at as a little gift from God, the gift from the universe type of thing. But I, I've still measured, I haven't had any changes. But if I'd done what anybody else told me and I'm not educated myself to all my options, I'd be loving piece of my brain. And by the way, number one side effect is loss of energy which to me would be like cutting Samson's hair. You know, it's like I get up and do 12 hours in a shot, you know, with the level of intensity most people can't even imagine. And you know, I'm 64 years old that doing what I'm more than I did when I was 24. So that was not something I was willing to settle for. So I think that's why I wrote the book Life Force. I wanted to give them the best experts on the face of the earth in every area that matters and then they can dive in as much or as little as they want, do the natural things they can naturally do or take on some of the newest breakthroughs in medicine as well.

Yeah, one of the things that you hit on is, you know, kind of people are nervous to get these new diagnostics and you know, one of the things that we have. So we have a company in Vijay's portfolio called Qbio which has built an MRI scanner that can kind of basically scan you in 10 minutes instead of an hour and it's much cheaper and so forth. And then they do a kind of a digital twin type service where you know, they do comprehensive blood tests and all these kinds of things. And you know, I was so excited about it. You know, Mark and I were just like we're going to buy this for every employee so that they, you know, can just do it. The hard part is getting them all to go. So the ones who have gone, you know, we've had amazing results. You know, a couple of people caught things very early and you know, life saving kind of diagnostics. But people are nervous, you know, they don't want to know how did you, you know, how do you overcome that?

I kind of help people in the book with that because I was the same thing. It's like, I don't want to do that. It's going to find something, doesn't matter. We're going to over respond to it, overreact. But the technology is so solid today that to not know is, is you're an idiot. Because if you get to the stage three, four, it's too late. So why not catch it when it's small? And if you got nothing going on, it's just like a cool update like it was for my father in law, where it actually will bring optimism. If there's a challenge, I want to know it now. But you know, same thing, business. When I was a young man in business, I was overwhelmed with two companies. I got 111 companies now. It was like, oh, don't tell me the, you know, if someone said there's good news and bad news, just tell me the good news right now. I always say tell me the bad news. The good news will take care of itself. Tell me the bad news, let's solve it, let's move. I think you have the same mindset with your own health, but what you're doing. I would like talk to you offline about the company because we have a whole series of centers. We find 14% of the people have a life threatening disease they don't know that they have. And we are able to intervene immediately in ways that make a difference. But we also find about 68% of people have something that could massively improve their energy level in their body, which is the basis of health of everything in your body. So whether that be hormone support, you know, I'm not talking about replacement, you know, I'm talking about optimization. You go to your doctor today and if you're a male and your testosterone is 150, they'll say you're fine. But most men don't feel like a human if they don't have somewhere between 600 and you know, 800 or more depends on the person. So you don't have to replace anything. But there are certain things that can give you vitality. We gotta remember any, you know, a couple Centuries ago, 1800s, people lived on average of 30, you know, now the worldwide average is, you know, 72. And you know, so it's like the world has changed and you deserve to know the breakthroughs. You don't have to use them all if you don't want to, but you should know what your options are.

Well, we have mental models for this too. You could imagine this could get as standard and unexciting going to the dentist. They go to a dentist, you get your scan. Like, oh man, I have a cavity. Okay, I'm gonna have some procedure, you take it out. It's not a big deal. It's not fun, maybe, but it's not life threatening. And you can imagine that might be the future of something like cancer where you get your scan. Like, oh man, it's like stage one. I have to do some surgery or maybe take this drug by a cop super early. It's going to be very straightforward. It's not going to kill me. It might not be pleasant, but actually kind of like not going to the dentist for like a lifetime could be very unpleasant. Like not going to. This could be anymore.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And I guess, you know, the. We used to die of all kinds of things that we don't die from.

Now.

Yeah, we have, we actually have an insurance company now we're doing for businesses that self insure where our insurance costs the same amount, but we do all these tests in advance. And the reason we can do it and it's profitable is because we catch it when it's small. All the money goes for those later stages when people are breaking down, when it's too late. And so you change their life, you save their life and you save economics as well. And I think that'll be, I think that's the entry point. I think businesses are probably the entry point as well as individuals who are going to seek out a better quality.

Of care for employees. One of the things that I find, which is why it's so compelling for businesses, is, you know, as a business, you've got a kind of business incentive to not like have your employees get sick. But, you know, it also is kind of a great, you know, to your earlier point, Tony, about, okay, are you actively engaged? Are you actively disengaged? Are you kind of semi engaged? And nothing kind of engages people more than, wow, like, you're going to live a long time, we're going to take care of you. This is the thing. Life is great. We're, you know, that's the thing that kind of gives people kind of gets them fired up about work. And we kind of have this old system where businesses have to provide health insurance, but it's done in like the dumbest way imaginable, like massively expensive. You know, we'll only, we don't want to pay for diagnostics. We only want to pay when you get sick and all these kinds of, you know, bananas things. So, so, so maybe that is you know, that we gotta do.

We have a disease care system, not a healthcare system right now. Yeah, that's gonna change is because also so much is being miniaturized. That's why I want to find about what you guys are doing. I know Open Water is working on one NMRI you could do in your home for like $1500. I know they're not there yet, but that's their vision and direction. So much is going to be things that are tied to your wrist or, you know, we're going to have that data live. We all have it right now, but at a whole different level in the next next six to ten years. And I think it's going to make a giant difference. And then you look around with AI and you look around at all the jobs that will be disrupted, new jobs will be created. But my bigger concern is that people, you know, people say no one has to work. Well, that's part of the challenge we have right now. People need meaning and without, without some form of work. And you know, some people's work is play. I don't know, I assume for you guys it's more play than work. It certainly is for me. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's not hard at times, but. But the bottom line is you enjoy it or you wouldn't be doing it at this stage of your life. You don't have to, nor do I. But if you can get people to experience that meaning and whatever they do, but it's got to be. I think the thing that we're somehow missing that's part of the mental health side, is understanding that I'm here for something more than myself. You know, until you find something you value more than yourself, that you want to serve, you're going to have limited energy, limited focus, limited everything. Because the more you focus on yourself, the more you're miserable. It's just the way the mind works. Works. Your mind is a great tool, should be used. Don't let it use you. It's like tech, you know, tech sometimes starts to use us if we're not smart. Right. You know, social media is a perfect example of that. But if you're smart, you use your mind, but your mind's never going to allow you to enjoy an apple. It's going to go, is it organic? You know, it's going to question everything. But you know, your heart and your spirit are part of that health. And getting people to experience more of that aspect of their life changes everything that changes the meaning of their life. It makes them more Fulfilled. And I'm really interested, not in just solving a problem. I'm interested in extraordinary quality of life. Most people don't have it. Most people are overweight. Most people don't have great relationships. Most people are not financially sound. I mean, I'm not dumb. But there are a few that are. And I prefer to study the few who do and expand the few that do to the largest number I possibly can. And then the rest I try to take care of by, you know, providing food for a billion meals, as I've done. Or, you know, I'm now working on 100 billion meal challenge. To give you an idea, because we did our. I got fed when I was a little kid at 11 years old with no food. Changed my entire life. But the biggest change was not the food. It was like, strangers care. That belief came out of that meal. And because of that belief, I promised myself I'd do it for somebody else someday. So When I was 17, I fed two families. Then four, then eight, then 12, and then just kept multiplying until I got to 4 million a year. Two million for me, 2 million from my foundation. Then I was writing Money Master the Game, you know, interviewing 50 of the smartest financial people in the world. Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, you know, Paul Tudor Jones, Warren Buffett. And while I'm doing it, I saw they cut the food stamp program. It's now called SNAP, and they cut it by $6 billion, which means every family on Earth. We're not on Earth in the United States that needs support would have to go without one week's worth of food unless people like us jumped in. So I was like, how many people I fed in my lifetime from the original. I started, and I found out it was 42 million. I was really excited about that. And I thought, what if I did that in a year? What I've done my whole life in a year. Did 50 million. There's like, what if I did 100 million a year? What about 100 million meals for a decade? Did a billion meals. And I'm proud to tell you I did it in eight years, not 10 years. We finished it this last year. But now the issue is bigger around the world. You know, Governor Beasley, who's with. Who just retired from the World Food Program at the UN is now a partner of mine in this area. And he called me up one day and he goes, it's unbelievable what you've done here. But. But because the 80 million people normally looking for a meal that are. Have food insecurity is 350 million this year. No one's talking about it. The Ukraine war has basically shut down the breadbasket. You know, the WF doesn't want people to use, you know, you know, the pieces for fertilization that we normally use. Right. They don't want us to use that. And most of it comes out of Russia. So what are we going to do? Well, people are dying all over the place. So we got together and I opened up the Forbes philanthropy event, and I brought him in and myself, and we both spoke and I said, look, and we're looking for 99 more people like me. I'm not a multi billionaire, and I did this. I did 100 million meals a year for 10 years. And, like, there's got to be 99 more people that can do that. We need about 70 billion meals. While they get the infrastructure in to deal with things over the next 10 years, I'm proud to tell you, we're up to 60 billion meals in a year. So it's like, like, what's possible can change when you educate people. What's possible can change when you do something people don't think is possible. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not pretending to have all the answers, but there are people that have the answers, whether it's health, whether it's finance. I want to go to them and I want to take what they have and bring it to people now, not 20 years from now, when their clinician finally gets up to speed.

That's amazing, by the way, and thank you and congratulations. I don't even have to thank you because I can see it's done more for you probably than anybody who's gotten a meal. It's amazing.

I love it. Are you kidding me? I've never. I got to meet some of these people, but very few of them out of a billion meals. But Feeding America has been my partner, by the way, and they're the best organization I've ever worked with, and I've worked with tons. They're really efficient here in the US but now it's a bigger issue overseas, as you know, that's working on now, but so.

So you've hit on something that, you know, has been driving both Mark and I crazy. And maybe you can help us with it in Silicon Valley. So in Silicon Valley, with the advance of AI, there's all these kind of people who, who are worried about, you know, what AI might automate. And then their answer is this idea of universal basic income where it's like, oh, like we all make it so only us smarties have to work and then you regular people will just to make it so you don't have to work. And you know, both he and I are like, wow, that's a bad idea. You're going to take away everybody's purpose. And by the way, you know, AI hasn't so far taken away any jobs. It doesn't look like. So we'll see how that goes or, or the net on a net basis. But, you know, kind of countering that argument is, is tricky in the sense that.

You know, I'll point out things.

I'm like, you know, we have UBI for Native Americans. It's called the reservation system and it's horrible. And you know, it's $65,000 a year piece and it does not do anything. You know, it's the worst thing we probably ever did. And so, but, you know, people go, well, like, what are you going to do? And how do you think about like, like, what are we going to do in these job transitions as they happen? Because, you know, even if we're net plus jobs, we'll probably, you know, transition out of some old jobs, as we always have with automation, and get to the new ones. And how do you think about that and making sure people have purpose, you know, when they lose their job and have to get retrained?

I think it's one of the biggest issues that no one's paying attention to. I asked President Obama about this years ago and he's like, oh, it's not going to change that fast. And I said, hey, look at what just happened, you know, in the, you know, the world financial crisis, the number of jobs of people just driving Ubers, taxis and trucks. Let's just assume at some point in the near future you're going to have the opportunity to not have a truck driver who needs health care and who will complain and can only drive eight hours a day max and takes lots of insurance. And now you got a truck that you can depreciate and can drive 24 hours a day without having an accident. Insurance is lower. I said, that's 8 million jobs. That's the entire number of jobs that were just lost during that time that make the economy look like it's going through the floor. That's one category. And I said, you're telling me there's no. He goes, well, we've all discussed it with a bunch of experts and no one thinks the change can happen that fast. Maybe he's right. Maybe, maybe there won't be, but there's going to be disruption. There's no question for certain jobs. And we're not preparing these people at all. And what happens is just giving somebody money is never enough because they need that meaning. And once they get the money, they'll want more of that money. I'm not suggesting, you know, taxing, let's say some of these technologies separately and providing some core resources for those in need makes sense, or somebody's displaced. That money goes for education, for something new. I think that's interesting. But paying people to do nothing. I know there's some studies where they'll say, look how well this worked. But they're pretty rare and they're not long term. And so I'm very skeptical. Personally, I think, think, well, there's six needs all human beings have in my experience. And it's how I manage and work with people. It's like I see which of those needs are kind of their top two driving force. So we all need certainty, comfort that we can avoid pain, have pleasure. But if you're totally certain every moment, you'd be bored out of your mind. So we need uncertainty, we need variety to feel alive. Too much variety, people freak out. Too much certainty, they're bored out of their mind. And there isn't like a lukewarm middle. It's more your ability to meet both needs simultaneously. There's the need for significance, to feel unique, to feel special, to feel important. You can do that by taking risks and trying to build something. But then if you fail, you look like you're worthless and unloved. And so most people found tearing somebody else down is a much faster way to feel like I'm moving up. It's an illusion. It doesn't last, but it's become a driving force. In social media, for example, you can have significance by how you dress. You can have significance by having certain pronouns. You can have significance by. By knowing sports scores, many bills. Significance by making more money. There's so many ways to get significance. The only question is, do the ways you do it empower you or disempower you and the people around you? Fourth, we need connection and love. Everyone needs it. Some people settle for connection because love's too scary. And then the spiritual needs are number four, five, we got to grow. We grow or we die. Number six, we got to contribute. So if I don't work, I need something else that's going to call me past my certainty, get me to step into the world of uncertainty, which is where all aliveness comes from. Aliveness comes from uncertainty, not knowing. That's where growth gets stimulated by trying something you haven't done before. We need to find better ways to feel significant by doing something useful for others, as opposed to demanding significance by you calling me King Tony because that's my new pronoun or whatever it is that you want to make for it. Right? You know, fire. Call me sire pronoun for now.

Right.

You know, so it's like lots of ways the question you gotta ask yourself is, do they serve or not? And I think our society has become very driven by certainty and by significance, but it's significance at any cost. And so I can change the colors, the pictures and the way I look. I can tear somebody else down, look good, I can put up a flag of another country and I don't know anything about it, but suddenly I can virtue signal and I'm a good person. And so all that I think is starting to wear out. I hope, hope, because we're all, you know, we're all dying for something deeper or, you know, reality TV is. So it's like, is there anything real left in our society? And I think when there's something real, people tend to move towards it. That's been one of the, one of the great things that's helped me in terms of reaching mass number of people. Because you can't fake it. When you're doing something 12 hours a day, four straight days and nights, giving you every ounce of your soul, people start to go, hey, this is the real thing. And then they step up because you go first.

And maybe Mark, like, how do you think about this whole, oh, people don't need to work, you know, perhaps we should hand them money or, you know, this purpose in life and, you know, if not work, then what?

Yeah. So the Romans had a fundamental conception of politics and it had to do with the relationship between patron and client. And so the definition of success in Roman politics was as a politician, you wanted to be a patron to as many clients as possible. And of course it's a dependency relationship, right? The clients are dependent on the patron. And so basically, I think that's the pattern that keeps re establishing itself. Which is, again, if you're a politician, what do you really want? You want a dependent voter base and you want a voter basis dependent on largesse and things that you can do for them. And then ultimately that resolves to handouts. And so there's a very natural inclination in the political system to basically, let's say, farm the Citizenry and I mean farm in the sense of farm animals. Yeah, like it's just, it's a very natural motivation on the part of politicians. And so it's a, it's a, you know, and look, it's one of these things where, you know, if people have the negative psychology we've been talking about, you know, the idea of basically getting free handouts sounds pretty good. You know, when people have, you know, real self respect and real pride, you know, they, they find that to be very offensive, which, which is very dangerous from a political standpoint because then they, you know, they're not going to just always vote for the person who's giving them the, the handout. And so as, as with all these things, it, it comes back to one's own view of oneself and you know, whether, whether, whether one is, is proud of, of what, of what you're, of what one is doing with, with, with your life.

Tony, what do you have coming up next?

I have a new book coming out. It's my third in the financial area, one that I think you guys would appreciate. Yes, this one is called the Holy Grail of Investing. And it's really based on the fact that for, you know, the last 35 years, as I'm the S and P has been up what, 9.2 and the average private equity has been up 14.2. So literally 50% better compounded per year for all those years. So I interviewed 13 of the best in the world. People, you know, like, you know, Robert Smith from Vista partners who managed $100 billion. Vinod Khosla, who's in your category, obviously Ramsey from Veritas, Michael Kim, you know, is considered the king basically of Korea. He's got the largest fund over there in Korea doing Chinese and Asia. And I brought their principal supply. But I also wanted people to see not only these people producing 20% plus compounded returns, some of them more than that for decades. But I wanted to see that they could get in the game. I only got into this a little bit ago, but I own a piece of 65. Not funds, but the actual firms themselves. You know, you can be a general partner or limited partner. Limited partners, investors. A lot of times it's like you guys pretty hard to get in there. And I was frustrated by that initially. And then I found out there were ways to actually own a piece of the businesses. So we own 65 of some of the biggest Silver Lake Starwoods. This Veritas, it's pretty exciting because you get the 2 and 20 as a partner. In this right alongside it. So I explained that. Explain how you can now own a part small portion of a sports team where, you know, they've averaged 18 versus the 9.2 over the last 10 years and they're not just putting butts in seats now. Now it's a different game or private credit where, you know, as a complement to bonds, where people can see two to three times returns. So the book is all about those principles and tools and it comes out on, I believe, February 13, actually. So hopefully people will join us. They can go to timetorise.com there's no charge for it.

I'd love to serve.

All right, that, that sounds exciting. I think I'll be joining that. So thank you again with that since we've taken so much of Tony's time. And by the way, I, I, I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you guys. I really appreciate your time and your energy and more importantly, I appreciate what you do in the world. Blessings to you all.

All right, thank you so much. And right back at you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Tony.

Sam, Sa it.